Every fall since 2000, student leaders and staff from various Temple departments and student organizations have visited students living in the communities around Main Campus to discuss being good neighbors and to connect students with area residents.
This year, the annual Welcome Wagon events, organized by Campus Safety Services, have a notable addition: a recycling bin giveaway—with custom numbering—for off-campus residential students.
Kathleen Grady, Temple’s director of sustainability, collected hundreds of older-model recycling containers, with lids, after they were switched out to a new standard on campus. She stored them in a warehouse that is home to Temple’s Surplus Property program until this week, when Grady started to distribute the bins and spray-paint students’ house numbers on them. She’ll do so until the bins are gone.
“The recycling can distribution program is aimed at combating litter, promoting the university’s Good Neighbor Initiative and championing reuse via Temple’s surplus program,” Grady said. “We’re excited for our off-campus residential students to put their bins to good use.”
Grady said the effort supports Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter initiative, which aims for the city to become 90 percent “zero waste and litter-free” by 2035.
Kathleen Grady, Temple's director of sustainability, spray-paints a house number onto a recycling bin.
Keep Philadelphia Beautiful Director Michelle Feldman and her team work to promote the various benefits of proper recycling—environmental, social and economic—through education and outreach across the city. Feldman’s excitement matches Grady’s.
“Temple’s effort through this bin redistribution initiative is recycling at its best: educating and providing resources to students, while living out the principle of reuse by ensuring receptacles have a second and even third life,” she said.
Temple’s Welcome Wagon stops at the following locations from 4:30-7 on these dates:
- Thursday, Aug. 31, at 16th and Berks streets
- Tuesday, Sept. 5, on the 1700 block of Gratz Street